AWS for Software Companies Podcast

David Gildea of Druva shares their approach to building cost-effective, fast generative AI applications, focusing on cybersecurity, data protection, and the innovative use of LLMs for simplified, natural language threat detection.

Topics Include:

• Introduction by Dave Gildea, VP of Product at Druva.
• Focus on building generative AI applications.
• Emphasis on cost and speed optimization.
• Mention of Amazon's Matt Wood keynote.
• AI experience with kids using "Party Rock."
• Prediction: GenAI as future workplace standard.
• Overview of Druva's data security platform.
• Three key Druva components: protection, response, and compliance.
• Druva's autonomous, rapid, and guaranteed recovery.
• Benefits of Druva’s 100% SaaS platform.
• Handling 7 billion backups annually.
• Managing 450 petabytes across 20 global regions.
• Druva’s high NPS score of 89.
• Introduction to Dru Investigate AI platform.
• Generative AI for cybersecurity and threat analysis.
• Support for backup and security admins.
• Simplified cybersecurity threat detection.
• AI-based natural language query interpretation.
• Historical analogy with Charles Babbage’s steam engine.
• "Fail upwards" model for LLM optimization.
• Using small models first, escalating to larger ones.
• API security and customer data protection.
• Amazon Bedrock and security guardrails.
• Testing LLMs with Amazon’s new prompt evaluation tool.
• Speculation on $100 billion future model costs.
• Session wrap up

Participants:

· David Gildea - VP Product Generative AI, GM of CloudRanger, Druva

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/

Brendan Ittelson, Chief Ecosystem Officer of Zoom and Fedrico Torreti of AWS share how Zoom and AWS are leveraging generative AI to revolutionize application development, enhance cross-app personalization, and streamline user experiences with intelligent communication tools.

Topics Include:

• Introduction of speakers and session overview.
• Generative AI's disruptive impact across industries.
• Reimagining customer experiences with generative AI.
• Driving productivity through AI-powered applications.
• Challenges faced by application developers with AI integration.
• Importance of AI as a collaborator, not replacement.
• Cross-functional workplace complexity with multiple apps.
• Reducing task redundancy via generative AI automation.
• Case study: AI accelerating creative project briefings.
• Business outcomes achieved through thoughtful AI implementation.
• McKinsey and Gartner projections on generative AI's potential.
• Top use cases: R&D, customer operations, sales, marketing.
• Bridging data silos for richer user experiences.
• Security and compliance challenges in AI implementations.
• Zoom's federated model for adaptable AI architecture.
• Meeting summaries powered by Zoom AI Companion.
• Expanding generative AI into chat, whiteboards, voicemails.
• Vision for AI amplifying, simplifying, and delegating tasks.
• Integrating external data for personalized user experiences.
• Open platform approach for seamless data exchange.
• AI Companion empowering users with actionable insights.
• Role of AWS in enabling AI-first solutions.
• Addressing notification overload with smarter AI design.
• Enhancing end-to-end workflows with unified AI tools.
• Encouragement for developers to embrace thoughtful AI adoption.

Participants:

• Brendan Ittelson - Chief Ecosystem Officer, Zoom
• Fedrico Torreti - Head of Product, AppFabric, AWS

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/

Massimo Ghislandi from AWS interviews Frank Contrepois, Chief Innovation Officer of Strategic Blue and Dvir Mizrahi, Head of FinOps for WIX sharing perspectives and best practices for FinOps, implementation, challenges and future FinOps trends for software companies.

Topics Include:

• FinOps is a new approach to managing cloud finances, bridging the gap between finance, engineering, and business stakeholders
• The implementation of FinOps can take a top-down or bottom-up approach, requiring collaboration and a common language across teams
• Shifting the conversation from "costs" to "investment" and "efficiency" has been an effective strategy for driving cultural change
• Focusing on automation, governance, remediation, and anomaly detection can have a greater impact than just cost observability
• Educating finance teams on technical cloud concepts and vice versa is crucial for building trust and alignment
• The future of FinOps may involve expanding beyond just cloud to encompass all IT assets and aligning with a company's overall values and business objectives
• Potential changes in legislation or accounting practices related to cloud could drastically impact the FinOps landscape

Participants:

• Frank Contrepois – Chief Innovation Officer, Strategic Blue
• Dvir Mizrahi – Head of Financial Engineering (FinOps), WIX
• Massimo Ghislandi – ISV Marketing Leader, EMEA, AWS

Today Anthropic’s Zach Witten takes us on a deep dive into Anthropic’s cutting-edge AI models—Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus—exploring their safety-first approach to generative AI and sharing essential tips for prompt engineering.

Topics Include:

• Introductions, about Anthropic
• 3 models: Haiku, Sonnet and Opus
• Scaling laws for hardware, data and compute
• Competing to be safest AI solutions, safety-first organization
• Leader in jailbreak resistance
• Interpretability features and breakthroughs for AI models
• Basics of prompt engineering
• Improving prompts with Claude
• Details matter – small changes to spelling, context will greatly improve results
• System prompt – role setting will improve results (i.e. “You are an expert mathematician...” for math query
• Be clear and direct – use XML tags where possible
• Encourage Claude to think step-by-step – answering fast comes with accuracy risk
• Use examples to provide additional clarity to Claude
• Bonus tips for image-based prompt engineering
• Q&A 1) Who wrote the meta-prompts in the cookbook?
• Q&A 2) Guidance for writing prompts for prompt generator
• Q&A 3) Best practices for tabular and structured data
• Q&A 4) Maintaining “tone” across hundreds/thousands of responses
• Q&A 5) Reverse engineering a prompt

Daryl Martis of Salesforce and Rashna Chadha of AWS share how Amazon Bedrock integrates with Salesforce to enhance AI applications, highlighting the partnership's strategic benefits, AI model customization, and secure deployment options.

Topics Include:

• Introduction to Amazon Bedrock and Salesforce partnership.
• Overview of Amazon Bedrock as an API-based generative AI service.
• The strategic collaboration between AWS and Salesforce.
• Salesforce Data Cloud and its integration with Amazon Bedrock.
• Overview of Salesforce Einstein and its use of Amazon SageMaker.
• Recent AI launches between Salesforce and AWS, including Slack AI and MuleSoft.
• Use cases of AI services like Amazon Textract within Salesforce.
• Bringing Your Own Large Language Model (BYO LLM) with Bedrock.
• Foundation models offered by Amazon Bedrock (Anthropic, Cohere, Llama).
• Overview of security, privacy, and compliance in Bedrock AI services.
• Salesforce Data Cloud’s unified customer data and real-time AI capabilities.
• Bedrock’s support for custom AI model evaluation and metrics.
• Consumption models in Bedrock: on-demand vs. provision throughput.
• Bedrock’s agent capabilities for real-world applications like scheduling.
• Demo of using Amazon Bedrock models within Salesforce.

Participants:

• Daryl Martis – Director of Product Management, Einstein AI - Salesforce
• Rashna Chadha – AI/ML Specialist – Principal Solution Architect – Amazon Web Services

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/